Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Free Speech in 303 Creative

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis to uphold the First Amendment right of a digital designer not to be compelled to write, design, and create websites that violate her beliefs.
 
Protect The 1st applauds the Court’s decision and the reasoning behind it. Despite the religious roots of the appellant’s beliefs, this is fundamentally a case about the free exercise of speech. The Court correctly decided that web design is an expressive industry, and that no writer should be compelled to write something to which they object.
 
Lorie Smith owns 303 Creative LLC, a web design company she wanted to expand into the wedding industry. But 303 Creative’s expansion ran headlong into the State of Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA), which would have required her to design websites for same-sex weddings in violation of her religious beliefs. Smith and 303 Creative lost before a U.S. District Court and the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals before being heard in oral arguments before the Supreme Court last year.
 
In a ringing defense of speech, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion of the inviolability of free speech under the Constitution. The majority opinion states:
 
“A hundred years ago, Ms. Smith might have furnished her services using pen and paper. Those services are no less protected speech today because they are conveyed with a ‘voice’ that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox.”
 
The Court noted that the Tenth Circuit, which ruled against Smith, had reasoned that Smith’s speech was involved in this case, but that “Colorado could compel speech from Ms. Smith consistent with the Constitution.” The majority concludes that First Amendment precedents “teach otherwise.”

For those who are inclined to see this ruling as the beginning of a discriminatory approach to services, Justice Gorsuch fleshed out the consequences if the Court were to uphold the lower court’s logic.
 
“Under Colorado’s logic, the government may compel anyone who speaks for pay on a given topic to accept all commissions on that same topic—no matter the underlying message—if the topic somehow implicates a customer’s statutorily protected trait … Taken seriously, that principle would allow the government to force all manner of artists, speechwriters, and others whose services involve speech to speak what they do not believe on pain of penalty.”
 
Justice Gorsuch then painted a convincingly realistic dystopian outcome for people on all sides, quoting a dissenting judge on the Tenth Circuit.
 
“The government could require ‘an unwilling Muslim movie director to make a film with a Zionist message,’ or ‘an atheist muralist to accept a commission celebrating Evangelical zeal,’ so long as they would make films or murals for other members of the public with different messages. Equally, the government could force a male website designer married to another man to design websites for an organization that advocates against same-sex marriage.”
 
Justice Gorsuch made it clear that there are sharp limits for this ruling, one that pertains to speech and expressive industries.
 
“[W]e do not question the vital role public accommodation laws play in realizing the civil rights of all Americans …”
 
Quoting a prior ruling that public accommodation laws “vindicate the deprivation of personal dignity that surely accompanies denials of equal access to public establishments,” Justice Gorsuch noted that Smith’s “voice is unique; so is everyone’s. But that hardly means a State may coopt an individual’s voice for its own purposes.”
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Protect The 1st agrees with the Court’s reasoning and urges people on all sides to take the same cool look at the consequences that would have flowed from an alternate ruling.
 
One doesn’t have to agree with a particular belief to agree with the principle that speech should never be coerced. The Court’s opinion provides a narrow exception, one to be kept within the boundaries of the exercise of speech.